From: NBC News
COMMENT - Has it occurred to anyone the problem might be the failure to assign only the highly psychopathic to these duties? Psychopaths will have no problem with bombing weddings and day care centers and gleefully carryout finishing off anyone who manages to escape, or shows up to help.
I can't imagine how this escaped the attention of those in charge of personnel. Perhaps they could call on Dick Cheney and Karl Rove for assistance. They will know exactly the kind of individuals needed.
ARTICLE
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U.S. Air Force
MQ-1B Predator unmanned aerial vehicles sit in a clamshell at night at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan, July 31, 2011.
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Driving
a war drone is a stressful business. Shifts up to 12 hours long are
stretches of dullness, watching and waiting, interrupted by flashes of
intense activity in which pilots must make life-or-death decisions. Not
their own life or death, however.
Pilots may be thousands of
miles away from the flying weapons system they're operating. They often
head home at the end of the day, as if returning from any other office
job, maybe picking up milk on the way. But while at work, their drones'
onboard cameras put them in a unique position to watch people being
killed and injured as a direct result of their actions.
As
psychologists learn more about the mental scarring warfare leaves on
drone pilots — caused by long shift hours, isolation, witnessing
casualties and those Jekyll-and-Hyde days split between battlefield and
home — experts from within the U.S. Air Force are calling for a review
of drone pilot selection.
Brad Hoagland,
an Air Force colonel and visiting researcher at the Brookings
Institution, and a fighter-jet pilot and operations commander of 23
years himself, believes that drone pilots could be picked better, and
that existing selection techniques are due to be updated now that the
service has accumulated almost a decade of research into the
psychological characteristics of drone pilots.
"The thrill of
taking off from a runway, flying a mission and then coming back and
landing at the end of the mission — that’s very exciting," he told NBC
News. "But I think that’s a different type of person who can do that,
than someone who is maybe wired to fly an unmanned system from a console
7,000 miles away. It’s a different psychological makeup requirement to
execute the mission."
Right stuff, wrong stuff"I
think we are still trying to figure out exactly what the 'right stuff'
is," Wayne Chappelle, a clinical psychologist consulting for Air Force
Medical at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, told NBC
News. "We have a general idea ... but I certainly think we're probably
more aware of what the wrong stuff is versus the right stuff."
The
trouble is that spotting the known positive attributes in up-and-coming
drone pilots is harder than spotting the negative attributes. To begin
with, Chappelle drew up a portrait of the ideal drone pilot from the
recorded testimony of 82 drone pilots and their supervisors in a 2011
report.
Good drone pilots, according to Chappelle's findings,
have excellent memory for pictures and sounds. They are bombarded with
sounds and images from multiple screens through their long shifts, but
parse that data quickly, cutting through the noise. They're multitaskers
and collaborators.
"These guys are very smart, very bright in
a wide range of areas. They are emotionally resilient and highly stress
tolerant and very motivated," Chappelle said.
People who have a
history of abuse or dependence on alcohol, drugs or other substances,
anxiety or depression, and cognitive impairments such as learning
disabilities tend to make bad drone pilots.
Although the strengths
of a drone pilot differ from the strengths of a manned fighter pilot,
Chappelle said the psychological screening protocol for both is the same
— and hasn't changed in a decade. "We're still looking at ways to
improve and expand upon the screening procedures."
In his
research, Hoagland has found that washout rates among undergraduate
pilot trainees headed to crafts like the F-16 are traditionally about 10
to 15 percent. But drone pilot trainees exit at 30 percent (though
that's down from 45 percent a few years ago). Pilots may drop out, but
more often, they fail to meet some flight or academic criteria along the
way, Hoagland said.
And when they do graduate, they receive
mental health diagnoses at a rate on par with pilots who fly in
aircraft, and at much higher rates than other non-pilot Air Force
personnel, according to a February 2013 report by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center.
NBC
News has requested to interview a pilot or pilot instructor at the
Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, where drone pilots are trained,
but to date the Air Force has declined the request without further
explanation.
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U.S. Air Force
A pilot trainee flies an MQ-1 Predator simulator mission at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico on Feb. 8, 2012.
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Testing, testing
In an upcoming report headed to the Pentagon, Hoagland will suggest some fixes for his higher-ups to consider.
In an upcoming report headed to the Pentagon, Hoagland will suggest some fixes for his higher-ups to consider.
For
one, though the Air Force has a test called the Pilot Candidate Scoring
Method, not all pilot candidates — of drones or manned craft — are
given the exam. (The Air Force Academy, for example, only recently
started administering it, and only on an "experimental" basis.)
"I
can't believe we as an Air Force haven't standardized this," Hoagland
says. Once everyone's taking the test, and baseline scores are set,
those scores can be mined for indicators as to who might be better
suited to fly an F-16 and who might be destined for a drone. "It's a
common sense approach."
Also, though it's been standard procedure
to assess concentration, attention, psychomotor skills as part of the
Medical Flight Screening-Neurosychiatric test in pre-screened
pilots-to-be, that information is not used in the selection process.
Tests do weed out the medically and psychologically unfit — Hoagland
thinks it would be an easy next step to ask: "Is this person suited for
an unmanned or manned system?"
The coming swarm
As the Air Force's drone program grows, so does the importance of pilot selection. What started in 2004 as five drone combat patrols — four aircraft each — will to swell to 65 patrols by 2014. By 2010, Predators had logged more than a million combat hours, more than any other military bird. And today's population of 1,300 combat drone pilots will be joined by 500 more in the next few years.
As the Air Force's drone program grows, so does the importance of pilot selection. What started in 2004 as five drone combat patrols — four aircraft each — will to swell to 65 patrols by 2014. By 2010, Predators had logged more than a million combat hours, more than any other military bird. And today's population of 1,300 combat drone pilots will be joined by 500 more in the next few years.
And as autonomous
systems evolve, the capabilities of unmanned craft will, too. The Air
Force will shift to a system with multiple vehicles flown in tandem,
answering to a single pilot. These "swarm" handlers will have more
complex tasks heaped on them earlier in their career.
"In terms of
who we need to have, I think we're on a learning curve there," Anthony
Tvaryanas, a doctor of aerospace medicine and technical advisor with the
711th Human Systems Integration Directorate at Wright Patterson Air
Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, told NBC News.
"If [a pilot is]
operating a swarm, what are you looking for in that person? I don't
think anyone's looking into those concepts," Tvaryanas said.
"As
we get from a pilot in an airplane to a pilot outside the airplane to a
pilot controlling 100 airplanes, I think we're approaching the limits of
what [prior experience and studies] can inform us. There's a need to
look back at training," he added.
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